A chronicle of the battle over ancient Kennewick Man's bones

May 04, 2003|By Steve Fiffer. Steve Fiffer's most recent book is "Tyrannosaurus Sue: The Extraordinary Saga of the Largest, Most Fought Over T-Rex Ever Found."

No Bone Unturned: The Adventures of a Top Smithsonian Forensic Scientist and the Legal Battle for America's Oldest Skeletons

By Jeff Benedict

HarperCollins, 304 Pages, $25.95

What is it about the United States government and bones?

In 1992, FBI agents raided the Black Hills Institute in South Dakota and seized the remains of a Tyrannosaurus rex that has since become a Chicago icon. The dinosaur we now know as Sue had been discovered in 1990 on the property of an American Indian who had then sold it to the institute. But after receiving a complaint from the Indian's tribe, the Justice Department ordered the seizure and claimed that the fossil belonged to the government. Following protracted litigation, a federal judge ruled that the bones belonged to the Indian. Chicago's Field Museum eventually bought Sue at auction for more than $8 million.

Four years after its intervention in South Dakota, the U.S. again became embroiled in a highly publicized dispute over bones. This controversy, which pitted Indians and the government against scientists from the Smithsonian Institution and other venues, revolved around a remarkably well-preserved, 9,800-year-old human skeleton dubbed the Kennewick Man because it was found along the Columbia River near Kennewick, Wash.

The fight over the Kennewick Man has been the subject of previous books. Jeff Benedict's compelling "No Bone Unturned" is the most recent addition to the bibliography. It stands apart from its predecessors not only because it offers the most up-to-date narrative of events, but also because it tells the story through the eyes of the brilliant Smithsonian forensic anthropologist who stood at the center of the storm, Doug Owsley.

When Benedict, who has a law degree and has written three previous books, began following the case of the Kennewick Man, he had never heard of Owsley, the lead plaintiff in the litigation involving the disposition of the skeleton. Soon, however, he concluded that the scientist was "the most famous person that I had never heard of." Owsley, Benedict explains, "was deeply involved--after the fact--in the most notorious mass disasters, wars, and crimes of contemporary times."

The first one-third of the book focuses on Owsley's involvement in "notorious" cases before the Kennewick Man and should be of particular interest to fans of mystery writers like Patricia Cornwell and TV shows like "CSI." After the Branch Davidian disaster, for example, the FBI asked Owsley to identify David Koresh and determine how he died. "When traditional forms of human identification--fingerprints, facial features, or clothing items--were absent, Owsley was brought in to identify people by looking at bones, from which he could ascertain a person's age, sex, race, and cause of death," writes Benedict.

Owsley's "day job," as Benedict puts it, was studying and preserving skeletons as a curator for the Smithsonian. Some of these studies challenged traditional historical conceptions. In 1996, Owsley consulted with Nevada anthropologists who were trying to identify a 10,650-year-old mummified skeleton known as the Spirit Cave Man. Scientists had initially assumed that the skeleton, one of the oldest bodies ever found in North America, was an ancestor of today's Indians. After studying the skull and running the mummy's cranial measurements through a computer program that allowed for comparisons to other human populations, Owsley and his colleague Richard Jantz reached a different conclusion: "the Spirit Cave mummy most closely resembled the Ainu, a maritime people that anciently occupied coastal Asia."

This analysis stood conventional wisdom on its head. "Since the 1950s," Benedict explains, "most experts have believed that the first Americans arrived sometime around thirteen thousand years ago via a land bridge that linked Siberia and Alaska at the Bering Strait" and that modern North American Indians are descended from them. But, "If the Spirit Cave mummy looked nothing like North America's Indians, Owsley thought, it raised the question of whether another migration to the Americas took place" and whether those immigrants were the ancestors of today's Indians.

The Kennewick Man also appeared to be something other than American Indian to the paleontologist and the anthropologist who were consulted after the local coroner took initial possession of the bones. These scientists concluded that the deceased was Caucasian and had predated the Lewis and Clark expedition's arrival in 1805. They were shocked, however, when radiocarbon testing revealed the skeleton to be 9,800 years old. Certain that the skeleton could provide important information about the earliest inhabitants of the continent and whether there may have been more than one migration to North America, the scientists invited Owsley to read the bones.